NUGEN AUDIO DialogCheck
NUGEN AUDIO DialogCheck
Dialogue intelligibility plug-in.
Dialogcheck
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Every word counts
Poor dialogue intelligibility is one of the biggest sources of complaints from film and television audiences, with studies suggesting that almost half of viewers prefer to watch with subtitles. But this doesn’t have to be the case! DialogCheck is an AI-powered dialog intelligibility meter, designed to provide an objective measure of speech clarity.
For an audio engineer who might have been working on a scene for hours or even days, hearing the same dialogue hundreds of times, it’s a challenge to predict how a mix will sound to someone hearing it for the first time. DialogCheck combines ‘Listening Effort’ technology developed by Fraunhofer IDMT with a history view inspired by NUGEN Audio’s iconic VisLM loudness meter. The resultant plug-in, driven by dual AI neural networks and developed alongside Netflix, provides clear and intuitive data to support audio engineers in making informed decisions for their dialogue mix.
Key Features
- Supports up to 7.1.4 channels
- Realtime bar meter
- Timecode-locked history graph
- Realtime momentary clarity readout
- Median clarity readout
- User-definable Upper and Lower Percentile readouts
What impacts dialogue intelligibility?
Many of the factors that negatively impact dialogue intelligibility are outside an audio engineer’s control. Speech might be in a language or dialect that the listener doesn’t understand, or might not have been enunciated clearly, the listener may be hearing impaired, or in a poor listening environment.
But there are other factors we usually do have control over; loudness of dialogue, loudness of other audio (e.g. music or background noise), quality of audio signal, and the use of reverb and other effects, to name a few. If the negative impacts of these factors are mitigated as much as possible, the factors outside our control will most likely cause fewer problems.
All of these factors, both those outside the control of audio post production engineers and those within our control, fall into what Netflix’s TechBlog has referred to as the Dialogue Integrity Pipeline.
Listening Effort Meter
DialogCheck implements technology developed by Fraunhofer IDMT’s Oldenburg Branch for Hearing, Speech and Audio Technology HSA, which uses automatic speech recognition and psychoacoustic modeling. The LE-Meter has been validated through systematic listening tests, and its metrics show a high correlation with subjective assessments of listening effort.